OpenSUSE LiveUSB with Second Partition

Installing openSUSE on a USB stick hasn't been a problem since version 11.2. But using the stick for more than installation media requires a little trick.

Since openSUSE 11.2, LiveCDs images could be stored on a USB stick and used for installation without requiring a CD or DVD. The USB stick needed at least 1 GByte for the ISO image.

The question arose about what to do about the remaining GBytes on the stick. Now a script and some magic using the fdisk command should solve the problem. The trick is to load the createsecondpartition.sh script and use the following command to create a second partition:

sudo sh createsecondpartition.sh /dev/sdX

Substitute the /dev/sdX with the actual name of the USB device, which is usually /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc, depending on how many hard drives there are, and which can be determined using sudo fdisk -l.

A couple of messages from fdisk will appear. The script then adds the partition to the end of the LiveCD and writes the new partition table to the hard drive. After a reboot, the Live openSUSE stores all changes to the second partition on the USB stick.